Thursday, August 09, 2018

It's on Gio now

It's only 1-2 so far. The Phillies haven't gone anywhere. The Wild Card opponents are roughly the same distances away. The longest winning streak currently in the NL is 2 games. Nats are still finding treading water isn't killing them. But the Braves are further away and a loss tonight would put them 6 and 6.5 back of their two division rivals and 6.5 out of the Wild Card. From there it's hard to see a slip up in the Cubs/Cardinals away trip being anything other than a season ender.

The win tonight is about preserving the likely last of the leeway. Making that 2-5 game stretch not ruin an otherwise great finish. Yeah - I know. Great finish? But if you aren't hoping for a surprise comeback, what are you doing watching the game?

Here's my question - can we finally, finally, get a pennant race that is exciting after Labor Day?

That's a mature way to go about handling the rest of the season, but I think I will remain depressed about it. I've had worse luck than the Nats have had with Pythagoras. So far, they are 7-13 in games I've attended this year.

@Kubla - unfortunately, I think it's DeGrom's to lose at this point. Max is close, but DeGrom's got edges in most of the advanced stat categories. Max is just flashier with the K's and the W's, but voters don't care about the W's anymore. But Soto has it in the bag if he doesn't get injured or fall off a cliff production wise.

You watch because it is the dog days of summer. Baseball is a marathon and that fits an endless sweltering summer. In the recesses of your mind you would like to conjure up some meaningful games in September, but after coming back from a 9-0 deficit, the team couldn't carry it over. This team has failed to build any momentum for a 110 games. For them to catch fire now would defy the odds as well as the baseball gods. I don't mind being wrong on this one but a nine game winning streak is no longer enough. They need eleven in a row.The Redskins won't play a meaningful game for a month. Right now the Nats are filling in the void. Give me a Stanley Cup type run and prove me wrong. As for your readers, here is a thought. Going over the same five problems with the team won't fix them. Unless you think that discussing them endlessly is going to enlighten some alien who has found this blog for the first time, you might want to assume that we all know the problems. If discussing them helps you cope with the lack of success, then by all means have at it.As the games dwindle down, it might be time to look to the future because dwelling on the present doesn't seem to be doing you much good.

@Fries, got to respectfully disagree with you. DeGromm has a lower ERA and that's about it. If Max keeps doing what he is doing he could win 20 and get close to 300k's. The guy to watch is Nola who is having a stellar year. IMO...

On the Cy Young issue. You may want to Google Cy Young race for some guidance, ESPN has polled 32 baseball writers and the projected order is Max, Nola and De Gromm. Espn also has a article on a Cy Young predictor that it developed over the years. That predictor has Max first and Nola second. Just a quick look at what other people are thinking and writing.

Sardonically fun sidenote: After looking up the advanced stats on deGrom and Scherzer (neither leads the NL in xFIP but deGrom is ahead of Max by a couple spots; Max leads the NL in SIERA), I looked up who is dead last in the two advanced ERA metrics. The two bottom spots in both metrics belong to Lucas Giolito and Reynaldo Lopez.

I know baseball writers and sophisticated fans have evolved past using the old Bill James formula of 4xW - 2xL + 3xShutouts for predicting Cy Young Awards (which he proposed in one of his mid-80s Baseball Abstracts as an improvement over the conventional 2xW - L formula), but DeGrom actually has a LOSING record.

Even when Steve Carlton won the CYA in 1972 on a 59-97 Phillies team, he at least had a 27-10 record!

It would be interesting to go back and see who's come the closest to winning the CYA with a losing record, or what's the lowest number of wins for starter winning the award. (Harper?!?)

But unless the Mets improve by some significant order of magnitude, DeGrom ain't gonna' be the first (especially given the years Max and Nola are having).

King Felix had barely better than a .500 record (13-12) while playing for a heinous Mariners team in 2010 when he won, but he led the AL in ERA, Ks, and IP. The NL winner that year was the top W guy, Roy Halladay :(

I was shocked to see some sites that had deGrom out front. W's are not an important stat, but the majority of the time, the guy who get 20 wins (especially if he's the only one), has a top 3 ERA and a ton of K's, wins the award. The only example I see where this didn't happen is Felix's year. But even then, he had the IPs, ERA, and K's, just not the wins. He still had 13 wins. deGrom is 6-7. Sorry. Like Ben said above, Steve Carlton won it on a crappy Phils team, but still went 27-10. deGrom isn't in the hunt.

Only way I see Nola winning this is if Max's ERA balloons to over 3.00 AND he doesn't reach 20 Wins. I think smart baseball writers/whoever votes likes to be unpopular and pick someone random, rather than admit that we are watching Sandy Koufax-dominance all over again. Some people hate watching that stuff and want to see something like that crumble. I, on the other hand, root for greatness and would love to tell my kids/grandkids someday that "Yeah, I got to see Max Scherzer play."